"there are immaturities, but there are immensities"- from Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake

Thursday, May 30, 2013

How the fanzine refused to dieThe Guardian, February 2nd 2009by Simon Reynolds

I'd been writing a blog
for a few years when I opened my mailbox and was gobsmacked by a CD
package addressed to "Simon Reynolds c/o Blissblog". It wasn't so much
the fact that I was being of thought of as music blogger (as opposed to a
professional journalist who'd written for the Observer since forever).
It was more that it took me right back to receiving my first freebie as
the co-editor of a fanzine, Monitor, some 20 years earlier.

A
canny indie music publicist had realised that not only did band buzz
typically start with the fanzines, but many zine writers went on to join
the music press, making it a shrewd move to develop relationships early
on. The arrival of a free LP certainly had an instantly corrupting
effect on Monitor, which we'd founded on a strict policy of "no reviews,
no interviews, just thinkpieces". From then on we instituted a review
section in hopes of encouraging the promo flow.

These days blogs are
where most aspiring music journalists train for the big league and in
the interim release their pent-up geyser of opinionated-ness. Blogs have
enormous advantages over fanzines: they cost nothing and are vastly
easier to produce, their distribution reach is potentially infinite, and
instead of long gaps between irregular issues they can be updated
constantly. They are also more interactive than fanzines, which often
felt like they were thrown out into the void: you get links from peer
blogs or reactions in the comments box, exciting conversations and spats
develop, particular corners of the blogosphere can feel like a
community (albeit with the problems of real-world villages: idiots,
busybodies, know-it-alls, creeps and stalkers). It makes sense that
today's mouthy-git critics serve their apprenticeship on blogs, often
graduating to intermediary webzines like The Quietus, Pitchfork or the
late lamented US outlet Stylus: online publications that tend not to pay
much (or anything) but compensate by conveying cool status, access to a
large readership and relative freedom in terms of word count and style.

In
the age of Blogger, Live Journal and other online formats for
non-professional music commentary, the fanzine ought be on its last
legs, a relic of another era, as antiquated as an electric typewriter.
Yet strangely zines are holding their ground. People still make them.
And it's not just die-hard veterans from the golden age of the fanzine
(approximately 1977 to 1994, punk rock to riot grrl) but younger people
who've never known a world without email and the web. Although it's hard
to quantify, it feels like the fanzine is making a resurgence in the
face of digital culture, just like that other analogue format, vinyl.

Take
Elodie Amandine Roy, a 22 year old French girl who lives in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her zine, Applejack, is now on its fourth issue and
is a defiantly old-school affair made from photocopied and folded
sheets that are illustrated with hand-drawn black-and-white graphics and
held together by a sort of belt of ribbon (Elodie doesn't own a
stapler). Applejack's sole concession to digital modernity is having a
free CD-R instead of a flexidisc, which is what all self-respecting 80s
zines had (even Monitor did one). Roy describes her motivations for
doing it the old-fashioned way as "romantic … I wanted to make something
that would be visible and material and touchable. I wanted people to be
able to read them and keep them somewhere in their house." She says she
carries issues of Applejack around with her in her schoolbag and gives
them away to "people with friendly faces. I actually like to know who my
readers are. I'm not interested in having one million people reading my
writing online, because then they're just a faceless, fleshless,
distant audience. I like to feel in touch."

Roy belongs to a kind
of retro-vanguard within the youth of today who increasingly
disenchanted with Web 2.0 reality, seeing its limitlessness and
hyper-linked pseudo-connectivity as the problem, something working
against the intimacy of a real, grounded community. "Fanzines say 'hello
it's me, I'm here'. The internet is a bit scary to me – it is bigger
than us, beyond our control." There's a groundswell of revived interest
into analogue formats like vinyl (especially seven-inch singles) and
cassettes (often encased in elaborate, hand-decorated packaging), that's
strongest in scenes like noise, drone and free folk, where it parallels
the emphasis on live performance and improvisation (the unmediated
presence of the unrepeatable event). Roy aligns herself with the
"anti-folk scene", labels like Olive Juice, and says she never buys
digital music but instead prefers vinyl and mixtapes. "Music is
associated with tangible artefacts to me. A MP3 is a file – it can be
erased in one click. Collection makes recollection possible. The albums
you've listened to, the books you've read, they sit on your shelves, and
it is memory made visible. There is no romance involved with MP3s."

Although
Roy says she doesn't "deliberately choose vintage formats over new
ones", Applejack does have an arts-and-crafts air to it: the first two
issues were "hand-sewn". This interest in the limited edition and
hand-customised is a common thread within the new zine scene. Music
journalist Jon Dale operates a long-running zine called Astronauts and
has extravagant plans for the next issue: "I want to do it as beautiful
old wooden box, with each page as loose leaf vellum and every image
screen-printed. I figure if everyone's gonna harp on about fetish
objects, you may as well make a good one!" As a contributor to Signal To
Noise and similar esoteric music magazines,
Dale is an expert on underground sounds like free folk and noise, where
cassette labels are all the rage. In these circles, you often hear
anti-digital sentiments expressed. Sounds of analogue provenance,
whether it's acoustic instruments or antiquated synthesisers, are
preferred. Free folker Joanna Newsom reputedly won't even allow digital
music-playback devices in her own home, although such principled
squeamishness hasn't stopped her from selling her album Ys in both CD
and MP3 form (via the online independent retailer eMusic).

Not
every zine operator is so zealous about the superiority of analogue over
digital. Take John Eden, a veteran of fanzine culture since the 80s who
recently returned to the hard-copy format after a period of blogging. The music covered in Woofah
– grime, dubstep, digidub – depends on computer technology. Hardly a
Luddite, Eden was drawn back to fanzines for both sentimental reasons
and for their practical advantages. "I missed that feeling of holding
something in your hands, really. Something that impressionable people
might read over and over again and get obsessed with like I did in the
80s with anarcho-punk and industrial zines. But I'm also not sure people
absorb material properly when it's read fleetingly on a website – and
the boss might be looking over your shoulder. I also felt it would open
some doors – artists still like the idea of being interviewed for a
magazine rather than something online." As you can tell from its title,
Woofah celebrates the bass-booming tradition of "UK soundsystem
culture". Eden says the magazine's ethos is to "make it critical and to
have articles that engage deeply with the culture – either people
involved with it like producers or MCs, or with issues like the police
shutting down grime raves in London". Unlike blogs, which thanks to
their rapid-response format tend to comment on a mixture of
ultra-obscure stuff and mainstream things everybody's aware of, Woofah
sticks to the original remit of the fanzine: in-depth coverage of
underground sounds neglected by the mainstream media.

The era of the music fanzine really began with punk. Zines before
then had either been done by science-fiction fans, or they took the form
of newsletters and heavily pictorial, mail-order-only periodicals
produced by fan clubs and dedicated to specific movie or pop idols.
Punk's DIY ideology unleashed a tidal wave of samizdat publishing. But
the zine revolution would never have happened without certain
technological breakthroughs, says Joly McFie, a veteran of the 60s
underground press who would play a crucial role in fostering the UK
post-punk zine culture with his famously idealistic "print now/pay
later" scheme. "Around 1975 the price of duplication went down
dramatically," he says, noting that Xerox went from approximately 50p a
sheet to 10p. "Copy shops started to spring up all over Britain. At the
same time Kodak introduced instant printing. The combined effect of
these two things was dramatic, really on a par with the arrival of the
internet." Sixties underground magazines like Oz and International Times
(where McFie worked as the music editor) were irreverent and radical
but their actual mode of operation was far closer to a newspaper than a
fanzine: they were still part of the top-down transmission of news and
opinion, says McFie, whereas fanzines involved a shift to a more
bottom-up, anti-hierarchical set up that eroded "the distinction between
producer and consumer. You could be part of the process now."

Despite
these democratising technological breakthroughs, there remained a host
of limitations to the fanzine's means of production. Punkzines often
turned these constraints into an aesthetic of anti-professionalism. If
Letraset was one-use only and expensive, they'd cut letters out of
newspapers, blackmail-style. If photo-size reduction was too pricey (it
required a process camera, which cost £1 per shot), they'd just run
their pictures giant-size. Strips of typewritten and typo-riddled text
would be glued at skewiff angles, with pencil-scribbled addenda in the
margins. Other zines did their best to look like "proper" magazines but,
falling short, often looked a bit drab.

This remained the state
of the art well into the 80s, indubitably the boom era of zine culture,
thanks to the enduring impact of punk, which had split into squabbling
tribes (Goth, anarcho, Oi!, US hardcore) and spawned offshoots like
industrial and the cutie-pop/shambling/C86 strains of indie. What I
remember about Monitor was the sheer struggle involved in making and
selling the thing. In those pre-desktop publishing days, production was
protracted and painstaking. That was kind of the attraction, in a way:
although we were all ex-students on the dole, we weren't slackers. We
were looking for collective purpose, in a sense looking for a job. And
we made it harder on ourselves by having pretensions to being different
from other zines (indeed the debut issue included a critique of fanzine
culture, penned by yours truly). Monitor styled itself as a pop culture
journal (hence the essays-only policy – no rambling verbatim Q&A
interviews in tiny print for us) and aimed for an elegant,
verging-on-slick presentation: high quality paper stock, stark
typefaces, striking design. That this was achieved owing everything to
editor-in-chief Paul Oldfield. I recall him poring through books of
fonts for hours and rigging up a substitute for a designer's light table
using a pane of glass, an anglepoise and a wooden chair frame from
which he'd removed the cushioned seat. The laying-out of a Monitor issue
took many nights of small-hours toil, although I confess my
contribution was mainly moral support and making endless cups of
heavily-sugared instant coffee. Where I did come into my own was the
other problematic area: distribution. Being the least socially
unskilled, it fell upon me to trudge around to record stores and
newsagents in Oxford and plead with them to take copies. I took trips to
London to deliver copies to the ICA bookstore, the Rough Trade record
shop, and the late, great Compendium, Camden's radical bookseller and
clearing house for underground publications and pamphlets of every kind.

Fanzine
editors in those days would traditionally rail against the weekly music
papers for their out-of-touch uselessness and corruption. Yet at the
first whiff of an opportunity of writing for them, they'd jump at it.
When I joined Melody Maker in 1986 I was following a well-trodden route.
Just before punk kicked off, broadcaster/critic-to-be Paul Morley did
one issue of Out There, an attractively designed zine that was attacked
by Sniffin' Glue's Mark P for "looking like fuckin' Vogue", then
received the proverbial telegram from NME. Everett True went from doing
rebarbative indie zine The Legend to becoming Melody Maker's champion of
grunge and is currently the publisher/editor of independent music
magazine Plan B. Most meteoric of all was the ascent of James Brown – in
the 80s he was the mouthy git behind Attack on Bzag! before he became
the creator of Loaded and a magazine-publishing magnate-about-town.

Fanzines
in the UK mostly affiliated themselves to punk (and spent the bulk of
their energy debating what the spirit of that movement had been and
fighting over who had followed the true path). But in lots of ways their
vibe reminded me more of hip-hop. The writer-editors were like MCs, all
swollen ego and competitive hostility, unacknowledged legislators of
the music world who were totally convinced of the righteousness of their
taste. Just as every rapper wants to be where Jay-Z is, it makes
perfect sense that zine editors lunged for the chance of a bigger
audience. But it's different nowadays: blogs offer an easier route to
notoriety for loudmouthed megalomaniacs, while the impulse to do a
fanzine is much more about abstention from the mainstream, reaching a
select and compact audience of like-minds. So Elodie Roy's Applejack is a
freezine ("gratuit", it says on the front). "I generally take my zines
to record stores directly and leave a few copies." John Eden says Woofah
is "only interested in attracting the hardcore, wherever they may be.
Someone who ordered issue one lived down my road, the next order in the
pile was to someone in Russia! We have no plans to increase the print
run of 1,000." Jon Dale's next issue of Astronauts – the one in the
wooden box – is necessarily going to be a small run. "I do like making
limited editions of things, it feels like you've hand-blessed each thing
individually."

Doing a fanzine in the Noughties is all about the
process of making it, and having that direct impact on an individual,
who will (hopefully) cherish the object you've lavished effort on. Mike
McGonigal, who did the legendary American zine Chemical Imbalance in the
90s and now publishes Yeti, a hard-spined zine dedicated to all kinds
of outsider music and art, says that he sees a boom in zines "of a very
particular kind. It's all from the art/literary side". The web and music
blogging has freed zines from the need to provide news or even be "a
form of communication", so "now you have far more little zines with
silkscreen covers. Maybe made by someone in a band but there are 40 made
and half of them got sold probably."

In parallel with this
artisanal approach to creating magazines to treasure, vintage zines have
emerged as a burgeoning market. Although nowhere near the level of rare
records, there is a bustling trade in collectable zines, which
generally means those that have a talismanic connection to legendary
eras of music like punk rock or the 80s underground noise rock. Beneath
its vinyl-crammed racks my local record store in New York's East Village
has cardboard boxes full of old magazines in dust-protective plastic
sleeves: "proper" ones like Creem and New York Rocker but also zines
like Forced Exposure and NO, with certain issues priced as high as $20.
John Eden says he's "shed a load of my archive via eBay – the cost of
keeping that stuff, especially the industrial music zines I'm no longer
interested in, was far outweighed by the money they go for". Joly McFie
recalls picking up via eBay a copy of a zine that he'd helped to produce
on his printing press back in the late 70s, paying a tidy sum while
being acutely aware of the irony of having had at one point hundreds of
unsold copies lying around his Ladbroke Grove premises. And Mike
McGonigal recalls seeing "an issue of Sniffin' Glue in a glass case for
several thousand dollars, in this ridiculous ephemera/art/book shop on
the Upper East Side of New York".

What's going on here is what
academics describe as "slippage of the auratic". Walter Benjamin
theorised about the "aura" possessed by the singular artwork, the
painting or sculpture, in the age of mechanical reproduction. Yet as
digital culture takes over, "aura" is being conferred on things that not
long ago would once have been considered mass produced and
characterless. In the age of the webzine and MP3, it is solid-form
cultural artifacts – vinyl records, vintage DJ mixtapes, yellowing
magazines – that become attractive in the face of the infinite
dissemination and seeming ephemerality of web culture.

In this respect,
fanzines have a significant edge over even a golden-era copy of NME or
Rolling Stone, in so far as they're limited-run and thus closer to being
a one-off. Fanzines are dripping with "aura". They're special too
because they're typically the singular expression of an individual, who
often appears to be deranged with enthusiasm or frustration. And in
addition to evoking the fanatical intensity of particular moments in
music history, they tend to contain amateur photography of bands or
gigs: images that haven't been widely disseminated or officially
approved. So it makes total sense that collectors are hunting rare zines
down.

All I wish is that Paul had not taken the several hundred copies
of Monitor that languished under his bed for years after we called it a
day and chucked them in a skip.

One of my favorite British expressions is "gutted".
Crude vernacular for emotionally devastated, "absolutely gutted, mate" is what
you say when your team loses 4: nil or your spouse runs off with your best
friend."Thinking about the
ever-escalating output of reissue culture, it struck me there's scope for a
variant."Absolutely glutted,
mate" would be the plaintive admission of the chronic music fan
overwhelmed by the torrential output of new-old recordings. "Glutted"
perfectly captures that over-sated sensation, the aural equivalent to chronic
fatigue syndrome, where the auditory-pleasure centre of the brain is fried
after years of trying to process, absorb,
feel, too much music in too little time.

Reissue-mania --conceived in the largest sense to encompass
both official rereleases/compilations/box sets and the sharity blog bonanza of
out-of-print arcana--would appear, on the face of it, to be an unqualified
boon.Surely it's churlish to complain
when so many remarkable treasures have been unearthed?How easily we forget how ridiculously hard it
was to get hold of legendary obscurities in the bad old days when records actually
went out of print,compared to today
when everything under the sun gets reissued while the Internet/Ebay/et al makes
finding recondite weirdnesses infinitely easier.

Certainly there's plenty of fantastic bygone sounds encountered
for the first time this year I wouldn't
wish to have foregone.Postpunk's seam
ought to have been mined beyond exhaustion after six years of steady excavation, but gems are still coming
through.The Acute label provided some
genuinely unknown pleasures with Memory
Span and Flood Bank, their two
2008 reissues of music by The Lines (imagine A Certain Ratio with tunes) whileLTM launched their"Auteur Label" series with fine
anthologies ofFactory Benelux, Les
Disques du Crepuscule and New Hormones (how wonderful to hear the hooligan-Neu!
stampede of "Big Noise From the Jungle" by Pete Shelley's side
project The Tiller Boysapproximately 27
years after it fell off John Peel's playlist).Another great lost Manchester independent, Object, also received the LTM
treatment with a label overview plus albums by Spherical Objects and Grow Up.
At the other end of postpunk's timespan, ZTT followed its Andrew Poppy box set
and deluxe double-disc 808 State reisues with a lavishly appointed box
containing three discs of the label's monster-hits, oddities, and latterday
twilight-matter, a DVD of ZTT's arty promo videos, a Paul Morley mini-memoir
essay, but--frustratingly--not a
complete set of his heroically pretentious sleeve notes.Another area of personal passion, post-WW2
electronics/concrete/text-sound, was well-served this year by labels like
Paradigm (Trevor Wishart's Machine,
Lily Greenham's Lingual Music), Melon
Expander (Warner Jepson's Totentanz and Other Electronic Works 1958-1973 ), Trunk (two CD's of attic tapes from Radiophonic Workshopper
John Baker) and Creel Pone (too many to mention).And there's always the threat of new
obsessions budding, like the raw yet somehow unearthly funkadelic hypno-grooves
of West Africa, a dense zone of hard-to-find magic surveyed by Richard
Henderson in The Wire 298 and now dilettante-friendly thanks to splendid 2008
compilations from the Strut, Analog Africa and Soundway labels.

Did I say "threat"?There is
something vaguely menacing--to your wallet, hard drive capacity, spare-time reserves
and musical digestive system--about the way that reissue-mania is constantly
pushing back barriers, both geographically and in terms of that "foreign
country", the past. Curator-compiler types like Bob Stanley, having run
out of ways to remap the relatively recent pop past through the retroactive
invention of genres (wyrd folk, baroque pop, junkshop glam, etc) are now moving
steadily into the pre-WW2 era, discovering music hall or early gospel
recordings.Yet the horizon of the
historical past--as something ready to be reappraised and repackaged--is also
creeping up on our very heels. I was startled to realise that "retro"
now encompasses not just music from my teenage/student years (as with postpunk)
but the late twenties of my early days as a professional critic: Loop's 1987
debut Heaven's End was reissued last
month, World Domination Enterprises and Disco Inferno reissues are in the
pipeline, while Soul Jazz this year edged outside their "good taste"
comfort zone with a Ragga Twins retrospective and An England Story, an overview
of the Jamaica-into-UK tradition of toasters and mic chatters from dancehall
through jungle to grime.Archive fever's
tentancles even reached the later Nineties this year with an overdose of heroin
house: Gas's Nah und Fern box
(reissue of the year?), a remastered rerelease of Monolake's HongKong, Basic Channel's BCD-2. What next,the double-disc Deluxe Edition of Oval's 94 Diskont?!?

Reissue-mania appeals to the best and worst in music-fan
psychology. Worst first: sheer greed for sound-stimulus,a ravenous, insatiable appetite for novelty
combined with a neurotic anxiety about missing out on anything.But there's also a call to the better angels
of our nature:a self-edifying impulse
to become the most fully-rounded listener you can be combined with a drive
towards redressing historical injustices,genres like Italodisco, Freestyle or Eighties dancehall that suffered
from critical condescension in their own heyday.And yet for all that, speaking purely from a
punter's point of view, doesn't it feel like it's all gotten a little out of
hand?I can't be the only one who
visits UbuWeb's immensely laudable, ever-growing archive of experimental sound,
text and film and almost faints at the prospect of all that (thoroughly
deserving) creativity's claims on my attention. Surely I'm not alone in feeling
oddly heart-stick upon reading about Honest Jon's access to EMI'sgargantuan treasury of 78 rpm recordings from
across the globe made by roving sound-collector FredGaisberg in the first decade of 20th Century, which
has already resulted in the compilation Give
Me Love: The Brokenhearted of Baghdad 1925-1929, with others soon-to-come documenting
Turkey, the Caucasus, Iran, and the Belgian Congo? Even a Radiophonic fiend
like myself felt a shiver of queasy ambivalence at the ostensibly joyous news
about the monster cache of Delia Derbyshire material discovered this year, or
the announcement thatGoldsmiths
University is establishing an online archive of Daphne Oram's complete
soundworks (which runs to over 200 tape reels). Queasy, because, to be
perfectly honest,my life isn't… that…. empty.

There's another downside to reissue-mania, affecting production as
opposed to consumption. As young musicians develop in a climate where the
musical past is accessible and available to an inundating degree, more and more
you encounter artists whose work is a constellation of exquisite and
"surprising" taste, a lattice-work of reference points and sources
that spans the decades and the oceans but never quite manages to invent for
itself a reason to exist.This syndrome,
which has been building for years, rose to the surface of critical
consciousness in the Soundcheck section ofthis very magazine last month. Celebrating Neil Landstrumm, Joe Mugsg had
to do some fancy footwork to sidestep the counter-case that this sort of "wonky"
eclectronica is mere post-rave pastiche. A few pages later, Matthew Wuethrich, reviewing
albums by Valerio Cosi, asked a salient question: "where amid all this
din" ofinfluence-daubed,
transglobally hybridized musicking could you locate the artist himself?Glutted musicians make clotted music, it stands
to reason. But short of a rigorous,
self-blinkering regime of privation and seclusion, it's hard to see a way out
of that.

Some call them "sharity" blogs, a three-way pun on
"share" + "rarity" + "charity".An inevitable evolution from the single-track-oriented
mp3 blog, these whole-album music blogs have
undergone a population explosion over the last three years, enabled by
filesharing services like Megaupload and Rapidshare, along with mediators like
Sharebee which automatically distribute a blog's upload to an array of services,
thereby increasingaudience reach.In this grand give-away bonanza, barely a
genre seems unrepresented, from the most readily-available mainstream fare (fancy
the complete discography of Iron Maiden? Every last Pink Floyd bootleg demo?)
to the most inaccessible arcana (West African guitarpop cassettes,100-edition Eighties power electronics tapes,
complete catalogues of library music labels…).

What makes sharity blogs different from the peer-to-peer filesharing
communities that have come and gone over the last decade is that their
activities are more exposed. Indeed there is an exhibitionistic quality, an
aspect of taste display, to these blogs, while some bloggers have become cult
figures,"faces" on the scene
even though theirreal-world identity
remains shrouded.

One of the big names on the circuit these last couple of
years is Mutant Sounds,justly celebrated
for its prolific output of esoterica, most of which is out-of-print and
extremely hard to find.Founded in January 2007 by a guy called Jim,
the blog soon expanded into a collective, enabling Mutant to sustain its
ferocious rate of posts and expand its weirdo-music range.That remit encompasses the more recondite
recesses of postpunk DIY, Euro-prog/Rock In Opposition, Neue Deutsche Welle, American freak music in a zone roughlybounded by Zappa, the Residents and the LAFMS,
minimal synth, acid folk, analog-synth space rock, second-wave industrial
cassette compilations,and much, much more.Eric Lumbleau--who contributes to Mutant
under the alias vdoandsound but unusually for a sharity blogger is comfortable
revealing his real identity--says a key motivation is to "help demolish
once and for all that hoary old line of critical discourse developed in the
wake of punk's Year Zero that any meaningful discussion of radical musical
thought first entails jettisoning prog outright."

The Mutant
collective are a prime example of a drastic transformation that's taken place
in record collector culture. The impetus used to be "I have something that
no one else has". But with the advent of sharity blogging that's shifted
to "I've just got hold of something no one else's got, so I'm immediately
going to make it available to EVERYBODY." While definitely a giant
evolutionary step in terms of emotional health, on the level of subcultural
capital and the gamesmanship of hip it's kinda self-subverting. Or perhaps, not
since there is still an element of ego involved, a kind of competitive
generosity contest between the blogs. Lumbleau sees it as based in "self aggrandizing altruism, with blog authors anointing themselves as
gurus and presiding over their own little kingdoms of cool and in the process,
throwing open the floodgates to decades worth of occult knowledge for casual
perusal, a mass unleashing that's surely causing fantastic intellectual
ruptures across every strata of adventurous music making."

Jim
Mutantsounds, for his part, likes to distinguish between the record collector and
the music enthusiast: the former is driven by "vanity of having something
that no onehas or knows…I would call him a sleeve art
collector,"whereas the music
fanatic has an evangelical drive to turn on other people.He notes wryly that "Mutant Sounds"
has already become shorthand term used by record dealers, "especially on
Ebay… trying to sell their items for higher prices" and says he'd
"consider the blog a disaster" if it contributed to the inflationary
spirals of over-pricing and over-rating that characterize collector
culture.The rise of "appeared on
Mutant Sounds" as a sales pitch shows that the blog has become an updated,
vastly-expanded, work-in-process version of the famous Nurse With Wound List, a
list of"out-there" artists
that appeared on NWW's debut album.Indeed in the late Nineties Lumbleau actually wrote a "reply" to the NWW List in
tandem with Matt Castille his band-mate in Vas Deferens Organization, while
some of the early sharity blogs were attempts to locate and upload every last
one of Steven Stapleton's recommendations.

Sharity
blogs often see an almost utopian dimension to what they do, redolent of that
early Nineties cyberculture/Mondo 2000
maxim "information wants to be free". Lumbleau enjoys fucking with
the hoarders of knowledge and "rare sound", admitting "there's a certain perverse side to me that just enjoys the reversal of
polarities for the hell of it, the rarest stuff now becoming the most
commonplace." Yet there remain lingering ethical doubts, to put it mildly,
concerning the practice of "freeing" music without the permission of
the artist. Because Mutant sticks mostly
to out-of-print or never-officially-released recordings by ultra-marginal
musicians, the blog has received few adverse reactions from artists, who---one
assumes--are probably pleased by the attention.Of the small number of complaints so far, most, says Jim,have been "polite, asking kindly for us
to remove the links."

Perhaps the real danger represented by the sharity
scene is actually to music fans!The
whole-album blogs--like the web in general, with its vast array of net radio
stations, DJ mixes, official give-aways,
etc--drastically exacerbates the condition known as collector-itis, whose
symptoms were recently identified by Johan Kugelberg as "constipation,
indigestion, flatulence." Writing in Old
Rare New, an anthology of elegiac paeans to therecord store, he described how the music fan
succumbs to "Falstaffian gluttony", "eating at the biggest
buffet, heaping and piling exotic foodstuffs not only from all around the globe
but spanning history, on your plate" and coating the intestines of one's
hard drive with"noxious
build-up."

The mp3-fiend's bingeing is an inverse mirror image of
the compulsion to disgorge displayed by many sharity bloggers. One of the most
torrential blogs around is Sickness-Abounds. Its operator \m/etal\m/inx
admits, "I've received
comments like 'slow down!!!' or 'you're going too fast!'…but I have to blog my way." She
discovered the sharity scene in late 2007 and "after a few weeks of maxing
out my downloading band with as much as possible", decided it was time to
give back and founded Sickness-Abounds, a
blog dedicated to every kind of extreme music: noise, isolationism, black
metal, power electronics, Goth, Electronic Body Music, et al \m/etal\m/inx brings up a couple of intriguing analogies for the sharity scene. The first is college radio, which in the Eighties "changed my life forever. That's what the music blogs of today recreated for me. It was College Radio x 100!" (Meanwhile, the college radio network in America seems to have dwindled in importance in parallel with the rise of the web and with the increasingly post-geographical nature of music culture). Her other comparison is with the tape-trading networks of the early Eighties. "I'd buy Metal Forces, Maximumrocknroll, and any other zines I could find and attack the 'pen-pal' sections something fierce! I really worked at it as if it was a full-time job. I had over 200 traders from around 30 countries by the time I was 16. We all referred to it as 'The Underground.' It was our P2P network, but without computers." \m/etal\m/inx also mounts a provocative case in defence of the music-blog's disregard for copyright, comparing sharity favourably with second-hand record retail. "Neither the label nor the artist benefits," she notes, when a second-hand copy is sold. "I like used record stores, but I feel music blogs offer a wider promotional benefit for the artists than shops do." Mutant's Lumbleau likewise argues that exposure via blogs like Mutant Sounds has re-ignited "interest in the work of the long overlooked" and in some cases even led to official reissues. What's left moot, though, is whether people will really go to the bother and expense of buying them if they've already downloaded the music free of charge.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

J.G. BALLARD

Salon. Thursday, Apr 23, 2009

By Simon Reynolds

Earlier
this week a literary colossus made his exit, after a long struggle with
cancer. The ovation that accompanied J.G. Ballard’s departure was fully
deserved. He was a visionary, one of the few fiction writers of our era
with an imagination so singular that he was granted the suffix
treatment: the attachment of an – esque or -ian to their surname, à la
Kafka-esque or Dickensian.

But in death as in life, Ballard never
quite got his full due as a thinker as well as a storyteller; he was a
penetrating and endlessly provocative theorist about the intersections
between culture and technology, media and desire. This tendency to think
of him only as a fabulist is understandable to an extent, given that he
never wrote a full-length book of nonfiction that condensed and focused
his ideas. Instead his insights, speculations and polemical barbs are
scattered across a panoply of reviews, columns, memoiristic essays,
think pieces and single-topic commentaries written for or spoken to
newspapers looking for the Ballardian
take on some current event, issue or innovation. (Thankfully, a
decent-size heap of J.G.’s wit and wisdom has been shoveled into a
single spot by the esoteric San Francisco publisher RE/Search: The 2004
“JG Ballard: Quotes” is a pocket-portable collection of mind-bomb
aphorisms and pithy observations. “A User’s Guide to the Millennium,” a
scrappy but absorbing anthology of essays and reviews, is currently out
of print.)

Of course Ballard’s ideas are also present in his
novels and short stories, and arguably at their most potent there. He
was drawn to science fiction as the preeminent literature of ideas of
our time, the only form of fiction that could take the measure of the
20th century. At his most full-on, Ballard transformed SF into a kind of
theory-fiction, his short stories and novels functioning in a manner
similar to Marshall McLuhan’s “probes,” the latter’s term for
speculative aphorisms as opposed to fully developed theories backed up
by research and empirical data. McLuhan is an apt comparison because his
primary concern — mass communications and man’s increasingly symbiotic
relationship with technology and media — overlapped with one of
Ballard’s key zones of obsessive investigation: the post-WW2 culture of
media overload, what he called “our perverse entertainment landscape.”
In a 1983 interview he characterized it as “a completely new thing, a parallel world which we inhabit,” presciently anticipating the virtual and post-geographical realm of Web culture.

Operating
as a fabulist, Ballard was less tethered than even McLuhan by the
restraints of academia or journalism. But even his most disturbed and
hallucinatory stories generally started with reality, extrapolating from
its emerging tendencies to create extreme but plausible scenarios in a
near-future more often than not located just past the present’s horizon.
Classic science fiction methodology, in other words. There’s an impulse
among some Ballard fans, especially those who are “proper” literati
themselves, to elevate Ballard and argue that his work transcends the
ghetto of genre fiction. Although Ballard occasionally expressed
frustration with SF’s pulpy aura, and later in his career wrote novels
that fell outside its parameters, he generally was content to situate
himself in the genre and loudly championed its potential. “I believe
that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature,” he
once declared, “… all writers would find themselves inevitably producing
something very close to SF … No other form of fiction has the
vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the
future.”

The work on which Ballard’s reputation is based — his
novels and short stories of the 1960s and ’70s — is either science
fiction or based on speculative techniques very close to SF. The only
real exception is 1970′s “The Atrocity Exhibition,” whose delirium of
experimental prose has more in common with William S. Burroughs than
Robert A. Heinlein. An unstructured collation of 15 micro-novels written
during the late ’60s and bearing titles such as “Why I Want to Fuck
Ronald Reagan,” “You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe” and ”The Assassination of
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,” “The
Atrocity Exhibition” reads like an infinitely perverse cross between
“The Golden Bough” and a forensic science textbook. Ballard described
his approach as gathering “the materials of an autopsy” and treating
reality “almost as if it were a cadaver.” (As a young man he’d briefly
studied medicine.) But his true interest wasn’t everyday life but media
hyperreality. He clinically probed the grotesque (de)formations of
desire created by media overload and celebrity worship, a new
psychomythology in which the deities were movie stars, politicians and
murderers. Doubleday was all set to publish “Atrocity” in the USA but
lost its nerve and pulped the entire print run; three years later it
belatedly saw American release courtesy of Grove Press under the title
“Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A.”

“Crash,” the infamous 1973
novel that developed from “Atrocity’s” coldly seething matrix of
obsession, is ostensibly set in the present but it feels like a form of
SF — if only because its cast of auto accident survivors turned
flesh-on-metal perverts are presented as a kind of erotic avant garde,
heralds of a future sexuality. Ballard had become interested in the role
of car crashes in Hollywood movies and the emergence of an appetite on
the part of a mass audience for a voluptuous and highly stylized
violence. He diagnosed this carnographic entertainment culture as a
symptom of suburbanization and anomie, the loss of meaning and community
in people’s lives, and a corresponding hunger for sensation. “‘Crash’
is an attempt to follow these trends off the edge of the graph paper to
the point where they meet, ” he explained some years after the novel was
published. As a kind of research experiment, in 1970 he presented an
exhibition at a London art gallery that involved the display of wrecked
automobiles, and was gratified by the extreme emotional responses of the
attendees. For Ballard this was the “green light” to start writing
“Crash.”

An early reader of the novel at one publisher advised:
“This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!” (Ironically,
Ballard was living a stable domestic existence of responsibility and
respectability in Shepperton, near London Airport, bringing up his three
children as a single parent — his wife having died tragically young —
and squeezing in writing between escorting the kids to school and
helping with their homework.) Many reviewers rejected “Crash” as
pornography. It isn’t actually a titillating read (for most people,
anyway), but where it does resemble porn is in its clinically graphic
language and extreme repetitiveness, with certain buzz phrases (“bloody
geometry,” “perverse logic”) and tableaux (angles of conjunction between
genitalia and instrument binnacles, semen emptying across luminescent
dials, and so forth) recurring in a manner finely balanced between the
incantatory and the numbing.

“Crash” is generally considered by
Ballard buffs to be the first installment of a loose trilogy of novels
set in a recognizable present-day (i.e., mid-’70s) London. But “Concrete
Island” (1974) and “High-Rise” (1975) could equally be seen as a
reversion to the narrative-driven approach of Ballard’s first four
novels, “The Wind From Nowhere,” “The Drowned World,” “The Drought” and
“The Crystal World.” This tetralogy, published between 1961 and 1966,
firmly belonged in the science fiction camp, and specifically the SF
sub-genre of the cataclysm story, where some kind of natural or man-made
environmental catastrophe causes the breakdown of society. “High-Rise”
simply localizes the post-apocalyptic scenario to a more confined area, a
giant apartment building in the Docklands area of East London, whose
warehouses and harbors would actually be redeveloped and gentrified in
the 1990s. But Ballard’s inspiration was the urban redevelopment boom of
the 1960s that razed the old Victorian slums of urban Britain and
replaced them with skyscrapers and gigantic housing projects linked by
concrete walkways and tunnels. Built in a spirit of neo-Corbusian
idealism, these massive complexes rapidly deteriorated into behaviorist
social laboratories blighted by vandalism, crime and drugs. “High-Rise”
takes the fraying of the social fabric several steps further than
anything actually going on in ’70s Britain, hooking the reader from the
opening sentence: “As he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert
Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this
huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

“Concrete
Island,” a slim and deceptively slight novel published the previous
year, focused the cataclysm/collapse scenario down to the level of an
individual. Losing control of his car, a man crashes into an area of
overgrown scrubland circumscribed on all sides by highways and
overpasses. Injured and unable to climb up the steep embankments, he’s
forced to survive as a modern-day Crusoe surrounded by the endless
streams of traffic, whose drivers steadfastly fail to see, or actively
ignore, his plight.

“High-Rise” and “Concrete Island” share with
the earlier, more overtly SF-oriented catastrophe novels a similar
psychological narrative: the protagonist who finds himself perversely
attracted to the cataclysm, feels at home in the drastically altered
landscape it’s created. “The Drowned World” — easily the best of the
disaster tetralogy, although I’m biased perhaps because it was my
initiating dose of Ballard — takes place in what now seems like an
uncomfortably possible near-future where sea levels have risen in sync
with temperature. The setting is a London half-submerged by water and
encroached by tropical jungle. While the surviving remnants of humanity
are gradually migrating to the Arctic Circle, Ballard’s protagonist is
last seen heading in the opposite direction, toward the uninhabitable
Equatorial zones.

Ballard has argued that the devastated but
dreamlike landscapes of these four ’60s novels are “far from being
pessimistic” but are actually “stories of psychological fulfilment. The
characters at last find themselves.” In a 1977 essay on the catastrophe
subgenre written for an SF encyclopedia, Ballard ventured that SF was
just a “minor offshoot of the cataclysmic tale” that had existed for
millennia. He claimed that these fictions spoke to primal and antisocial
urges, citing both the rattle smashing of the infant child and
“psychiatric studies of the fantasies and dream life of the insane” that
” show that ideas of world destruction are latent in the unconscious
mind.” But he also argued that doomsday novels were positive
expressions. On the one hand, they involved a form of imaginative
adaptation (he cited Conrad’s dictum “immerse yourself in the most
destructive element — and swim!”) in preparation for the worst the 20th
century had up its sleeve. On the other hand, they used the imagination
to create “alternatives to reality” and thus represented a legitimately
angry and subversive response to “the inflexibility of this huge
reductive machine we call reality.”

Seeing them as “transformation
stories rather than disaster stories” makes sense, if only because it
helps to explain what the reader gets out of them — which is less to do
with dread and more a kind of twisted utopianism or sublimated
revolutionary impulse: a hunger to see the world turned upside down. The
appetite for doomsday scenarios in fiction could also have something to
do with the longing for an emptier world, a response to our
overcrowded, stimuli-saturated civilization. J.G. Ballard didn’t have to
daydream about cataclysm, though; as a teenager he lived through
conditions of total collapse. Born in Shanghai in 1930, his childhood
began in fairly idyllic quasi-colonial circumstances (Dad worked as
managing director of a textile factory, they lived in a fancy house, had
lots of servants). But with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War,
Shanghai was occupied in 1937. When Japan joined with the Axis powers
against the Allies, all “enemy civilians” were herded into internment
camps. Ballard’s experiences of post-invasion chaos and prison camp life
lead to 1984′s best-selling and prize-winning novel “Empire of the
Sun,” the book that took Ballard from culthood to the middlebrow
mainstream (helped, of course, by Spielberg’s 1987 movie version, with
the young Christian Bale playing the J.G. character, Jim).

For
many of Ballard’s original fans, though, there was some disappointment
in discovering there was a biographical source, however exotic and
dramatic, for his trademark imagery of drained swimming pools, deserted
roads, abandoned airfields and empty hotels. All of a sudden we had a
pat psychoanalytic explanation (trauma on a young psyche, the aesthetic
equivalent of abused children re-creating similar psychosexual
arrangements for themselves as adults) for Ballard’s sensibility, all
his talk about “the magic and poetry one feels when looking at a
junkyard filled with old washing machines, or wrecked cars, or old ships
rotting in some disused harbor.” It all felt somehow reductive and
demystifying — which is one reason I’ve never been drawn to actually
read “Empire of the Sun.”

The fans’ misgivings were lent some
credence by Ballard’s post-”Empire” fiction, which seemed to lose its
spark, as though confronting his childhood experiences had defused some
crucial mechanism of creativity. While his novels of the late ’80s and
thereafter such as “Cocaine Nights” and “Super-Cannes” have admirers,
few would argue they’ve contributed a jot to his enduring cult, based
solidly on the early cataclysm fiction, on “Atrocity” and the urban
trilogy of “Crash”/”High-Rise”/”Concrete Island,” and above all on the
distilled, magisterial economy of his short stories, which regularly
appeared through the ’60s and ’70s in collections with titles like “The
Terminal Beach” and “Low Flying Aircraft.” Happily, W.W. Norton will be
publishing ” The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard” this fall, a massive
compendium that ran to 1,200 pages in its U.K. incarnation.

Stylistically
what connects the avant-porn of Ballard’s experimental phase with the
perverted adventure yarns of his cataclysm and urban-collapse novels is
his inattention to traditional fiction virtues like character or
dialogue. But more than plot, his books are about atmosphere, defined as
a physical space colored by or charged with a psychological mood.
Really the Ballard narrative is a machinery for delivering up landscapes
and tableaux that linger in the reader’s mind’s eye. In the ’50s,
before turning to writing, he tried his hand at painting, then gave up
when he realized he had no flair for it. “I would love to have been a
painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so
much,” he once confessed. In his fiction, vision reigns supreme over all
the other senses, from touch (sex in “Crash” is about the arrangement
of limbs and objects in compelling patterns, about geometry rather than
sensuality) to sound (Ballard professed to have minimal interest in or
feeling for music, although he did write a couple of very good short
stories involving music of the future).

All through his career, he
maintained a connection to visual artists, drawing inspiration from and
befriending the British division of pop art (Richard Hamilton, Eduardo
Paolozzi, et al.), whose infatuation with American advertising and pop
iconography had obvious affinities with Ballard’s mass cult obsessions.
But the surrealists remained his first and greatest love . He
passionately defended Dalí from fashionable detractors, while the critic
Chris Hall has noted the parallels between the dreamscape-like vistas
that teem through his writing and Yves Tanguy’s “strange beaches,” Max
Ernst’s “silent forests and swamplands, weathered scenery and gnarled
post-apocalyptic detritus.” Ballard, again, could connect it to his own
teenage experiences, describing “prewar and wartime Shanghai” as “a huge
Surrealist landscape … There was a complete transformation of
everything, complete unpredictability, while formal life went on, just
as in Bunuel’s films or Delvaux’s paintings — a bizarre external
landscape propelled by large psychic forces.”

A problem for anyone
who wants to write about Ballard is that the author is his own best
critic. You’ll come up with a perception, spot a pattern, then have the
smile wiped off your face as trawling through his interviews or essay
you’ll find it preempted by some remark of his own — expressed more
sharply, taken further. These ideas about what he’s trying to do, or
what fiction can be, are also embedded in the stories, which means that
they sometimes verge on metafiction (but without being tediously
postmodern — indeed, Ballard may well have been the last great literary
modernist). At his height, every image is an idea and every idea is
embodied as an image, sensation, mood.
Ballard’s achievement
relates to the adjectivization of his name: the fact that “Ballardian”
has become a glib descriptor for certain landscapes and cultural
phenomena is a measure of his impact.

For some of us, Ballard has
imposed his way of seeing between us and reality. For this sort of
hardcore fan, it was impossible not to think of J.G. within seconds of
hearing about Princess Diana’s crash (for added Ballardianism, she and
Dodi were harried to an early grave by the image-vampires of the
paparazzi, whose wages are paid by the general public’s voyeurism).
Katrina and New Orleans, too — the flooded wards, the refugees clustered
on partially submerged highway overpasses, the chaos and squalor of the
overcrowded dromes, seemed to come straight from his pages. Perhaps
reality caught up with his imagination, outstripped it. That might have
been his message all along: that truth was already becoming stranger
than fiction, something he’d glimpsed in occupied China in the 1940s.

Strangely,
although we live in an ever more Ballardian reality, I can’t really see
a Ballardian school of writing out there, even within science fiction.
Perhaps J.G. is easier to parody than to be positively influenced by.
Instead, his direct impact is most evident in music, particularly late
’70s and ’80s postpunk. Ironically, the art he had the least feeling for
was the one that responded most fervently and productively to his
vision. Probably his most famous fanboys were Joy Division. Their final
studio album, “Closer,” featured an aural abbatoir of a track titled
“Atrocity Exhibition,” with Ian Curtis playing the role of freakshow
barker, luring voyeurs with the chorus “this is the way, step inside”
and pointing to the twisted bodies on display. The band’s debut album,
“Unknown Pleasures,” pulled a Ballardian maneuver by aestheticizing the
postindustrial desolation of late ’70s Manchester, finding a somber
glamour in its derelict factories and baleful motorways.

Industrial
groups like Joy Division’s friends Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret
Voltaire venerated the two Bs: Ballard and Burroughs (the latter a major
influence on J.G., who read “The Naked Lunch” in the early ’60s and
drew huge impetus from Burroughs’ “severity” and unblinking,
nonjudgmental gaze, a reprieve from the naturalistic and moralizing
fiction that still ruled literary England). The Normal’s 1978 synth-punk
classic “Warm Leatherette” was a three-minute precis of “Crash”: the
catchiest couplet goes “The hand brake penetrates your thigh/ Quick —
Let’s make love, before you die.” Gary Numan’s “Cars” and David Bowie’s
“Always Crashing in the Same Car” bear slightly smaller debts.

Another
group of Ballard fans was the Human League. Founding member Ian Craig
Marsh, later part of Heaven 17, raved to me about “The Atrocity
Exhibition” and “High-Rise” (“the proles sending piles of human
excrement up in the express penthouse elevators, the documentary maker
who still carries his camera on his shoulder like it’s some symbolic
totem, even after the lens is all smashed to fuck!”). But the Human
League also made fun of the alienation chic of postpunk’s Ballard
casualties in their 1980 song “Blind Youth,” singing “high-rise living’s
not so bad” and “dehumanization is such a big word.” Elsewhere in ’80s
mainstream pop, the Buggles, those MTV-inaugurating one-hit-wonders,
loosely based “Video Killed the Radio Star” on the Ballard short “The
Sound Sweep.”

During the grunge years, Ballard’s influence dipped
away, but more recently it’s crept back, from Radiohead to the Klaxons
(who named their Mercury Prize-winning “Myths of the Near-Future” after
one of his short story collections) to numerous electronic musicians,
most notably another Mercury nominee, Burial, whose debut LP was framed
as a concept album about South London being flooded. And would you
believe it, as I’m writing this feature, a publicist’s e-mail pings into
my in box touting a new band named Empire of the Sun. Just as each new
generation of angsty and imaginative youth discovers the music of bands
like Joy Division for itself, it seems likely that half-lives of the
Ballardian vision will keep reverberating through pop culture for a long
time to come.

A fairy tale view of Britain: The Royal Wedding and American television

Los Angeles Times, April 25 2011

by Simon Reynolds

Strange
but true: The British public is simply not that excited about the royal
wedding. According to the Economist, only a third of the population is
definitely going to watch the nuptials on TV, while close to half are
actively uninterested. My own secret source on the English streets (OK,
it's my mum, who lives in a small town called Tring) reports that
"people seem much less bothered" about Will and Kate than about Charles
and Di in 1981.

Here in the U.S., the situation is quite different — at least if
television mirrors the mood of the nation. Judging by the blanket
coverage of the wedding lined up for this week, nearly every network is
banking on the belief that average Americans are enthralled by all
things royal. The other side of this fascination for the quaint old
Britain of pageantry and aristocracy is a lack of awareness about the
gritty reality of contemporary U.K. pop culture. This is the country
that pioneered reality TV, invented soccer hooliganism and whose most
widely read newspapers are tabloids featuring whole-page nude pin-ups.

From the tourist trade to romantic comedies such as "Bridget Jones's
Diary" and "Love Actually," the British themselves have often pandered
to American Anglophiles' out-of-date impression of what the U.K is like.
A perfect example of this syndrome is "Royally Mad," BBC America's
two-part special about five Americans competing in a contest of
obsessive knowledge concerning the Windsor family. Flown to London,
they're put up in an old-fashioned hotel where they're served full
English breakfast in bed by a portly butler and get to stand on the very
aisle in Westminster Abbey down which the royal groom and bride will
soon "process." Apparently, that's the verb form of "procession."

The explanation for the American love affair with this upper-crust view
of England might have something to do with the phrase "like a fairy
tale," which trips off lips frequently during "Royally Mad" as the
contestants describe the enchantment of gadding about London to visit
palaces and cathedrals. Anglophilia is all about the romance of history.
Despite having several centuries of colorful, dramatic and just plain
weird history to boast of, America seems to feel the absence of castles
and ceremony from its physical and cultural landscape.

Looking at
the output of mainstream TV and cinema, it can sometimes feel like
Britain owns the past. Britishness and the idea of "the olden days" are
totally entwined. Go back to the swashbuckling premodern past and you'll
find, curiously, that everybody speaks with an English accent. OK, it
makes sense that historical or legend-based dramas such as "The Tudors"
or "Camelot" based in old Albion would have all-British casts.

But "Game of Thrones" is set in a medieval fantasy kingdom that never
existed, so there's no earthly reason why American actors can't play the
parts and speak in their own voices. Of course, its cast is almost
entirely British. One of the only exceptions is Peter Dinklage,
wonderful as the licentious and caustically witty dwarf Tyrion
Lannister, and he's obliged to put on an affected, flowery English
accent. And then there are such series as "Rome" and "The Borgias," both
of which are set during different eras of the country that would later
become Italy but whose credits are crammed with U.K. thespians. There's
something about the English voice that simply fits dramatic situations
involving armor, sword fights, banquets, scheming courtiers and
power-corrupted bishops and the rest.

Perhaps it all stems from America's self-conception as the upstart
that's outstripped its past-its-prime ancestor. The Old Country has to
be kept firmly in the past. America wants England to be antiquated and
charming. Hence the popularity of "The King's Speech" and costume dramas
such as "Downton Abbey" and "Upstairs, Downstairs" (a revival of the
Masterpiece Theatre favorite of the 1970s recently aired on PBS). These
transatlantic coproductions are bonanzas for the actors of Great
Britain. Who else can they get to play all those stock characters like
the stern butler, the snooty dowager, the flinty cook, the plain but
good-hearted scullery maid? Period dramas such as these and the endless
Austen and Brontë adaptations have practically saved the U.K.'s
theatrical class from destitution. (That and Hollywood's bizarre
typecasting of bad guys as Brits.)

More than any other institution, PBS is responsible for maintaining the
illusion that Britain is a country where everybody takes afternoon tea.
Watching its period potboilers like "Cranford" with its cast of
bonnet-clad gentlewomen, its mysteries involving sleuthing spinsters and
its dated Britcoms that were often made back in the '80s or '70s, you'd
never guess that contemporary Britain is a rather lively and dangerous
place, a country with as many ghettos as stately homes.

True,
most police constables still don't carry firearms, and yes, we still
have those old red phone boxes. But gun crime is rising, and because
Britain was one of the first countries to embrace cellphones and
texting, the phone boxes now mostly serve as urinals for desperate
drunks and places where prostitutes leave "call this number" stickers.

Contrary to the archaic stereotype of refinement and restraint,
contemporary Britain is rowdy and coarse. Binge drinking and early pub
closing times mean that on Friday and Saturday nights, the country's
high streets transform into pageants of violence and vomit. The public
broadcasting that was once admired across the world seems to plumb lows
every year, with chat shows doused with gratuitous cuss words and
"documentaries" with titles such as "My Big Breasts and Me" and
"Britain's Worst Teeth."

If you look hard enough you can find
glimpses of this other Britain on American TV, in shows such as the
classic "Prime Suspect" or in the youth-oriented series "Skins" and "The
Inbetweeners." Excessively hyper and often toppling over into
implausibility, "Skins" did nonetheless capture many aspects of young
Britain in the 2000s, from the routine and almost unremarkable drug use
to the obsessions with clothes, gadgets and sex. The more humdrum and
bathetic "Inbetweeners" follows the misadventures of four hapless,
sex-starved teenage boys as they traipse through the modern-look
suburbia (not a thatched roof or duck pond in sight) that covers much of
the U.K. To get a shot at the U.S. mainstream, they've both had to be
remade (by MTV) with American settings and characters.

And so
televised Britain remains how Americans seem to like it: a fantasy land
of castles and cucumber sandwiches, trusty valets and well-spoken
villains, and a valiant prince marrying his fairy tale princess.

BACK TO THE FUTURE: a thinkpiece pegged to Where's My Jetpack?

Salon. Saturday, May 12, 2007

By Simon Reynolds

Staring
out of my window in Manhattan’s East Village the other day, it struck
me suddenly that the street scene below did not differ in any
significant way from how it would have looked in 1967. Maybe even 1947.
Oh, the design of automobiles has changed a bit, but
combustion-engine-propelled ground-level vehicles are still how we get
around, as opposed to flying cars or teleportation. Pedestrians trudge
along sidewalks rather than swooshing along high-speed moving
travelators. And even in hipster-friendly New York, most people’s
clothes and hair don’t look especially outlandish. From the trusty
traffic meters and sturdy blue mailboxes to the iconic yellow taxis and
occasional cop on horseback, 21st century New York looks distressingly
nonfuturistic. For a former science science fiction fanatic like me, this is brutally disappointing.

I’m not the only one who yearns for the future that never showed up.
The frustration is widely felt and has been mounting for some time,
gathering serious speed in the late ’90s when the
really-ought-to-be-momentous new millennium loomed. Dates like “1999,”
“2000″ and “2001″ set off special reverberations — not just for the
science fiction fans among us but for plenty of regular folk too. Even
now, when we should have grown blasé about living in the 21st century,
the dates still have a faint futuroid tang, a poignant trace of what
should have been. The obvious landmarks of tomorrow’s world never
materialized: vacations to the moon, 900 miles per hour transatlantic
trains hurtling through vacuum tunnels. But the absence is felt equally
in the fabric of daily life, the way that the experience of cooking an
egg or taking a shower hasn’t changed in our lifetime.

Nostalgia for the future, neostalgia — whatever you wanna call this
peculiar unrequited feeling — is widespread enough to constitute a
market. Enter Daniel H. Wilson’s “Where’s My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived.”
This paperback sometimes strikes a melancholy note: A passage on moon
colonies, which the New York Times in 1969 predicted were a mere 20
years away, notes that “the centerpiece of Disney’s
Tomorrowland attraction was the luxurious Moonliner spaceship. But a
future that included giant glass moon domes never appeared. Tomorrowland
was torn down.” Mostly, though, the book’s tone is petulant and
impatient. The title itself, “Where’s My Jetpack?” makes you picture a
science fiction nerd stamping his feet in a tantrum. Wilson strives to
speak directly to your inner 12-year-old: hence the high-fructose
corn-syrup-laced prose (“crazy-ass mad science” and, in a section on an
underwater city, “sea-tastic”), the groan-inducing puns (in the chapter
on lighter-than-air transport, “blimpin’ ain’t easy”), the puerile
fantasy of using an invisibility suit to sneak into the women’s changing
room.

A glib and flippant tone dominates “Where’s My Jetpack?”
but I get the feeling a more serious book is struggling to extricate
itself from Wilson’s arch and camp approach (something compounded by
Richard Horne’s kitschy retrofuturist illustrations). The research is
top-notch and fascinating. Some of the best material here entails a sort
of archaeology of stillborn or prematurely abandoned futures. In the
1960s, for instance, concerted attempts were made to build living
environments at the bottom of the ocean, in the form of the U.S. Navy’s
Sealab program. But instead of aquadome cities nestling on the ocean
floor and a massive exodus of pioneers emigrating to settle the briny
depths, all that remains today of the dream is a solitary subaquatic
hotel, the Jules Undersea Lodge, located just off Key Largo, Fla. Other
science fiction staples that made a tantalizingly brief appearance
decades ago but never caught on, for reasons either practical or
cultural, include the jetpack (the energy required for blast-off
generates dangerous levels of heat) and Smell-O-Vision. The latter idea
was mooted fictionally in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, “Brave New World,”
in which the “feelies” stimulated one’s tactile and olfactory sense as
well as sight and sound. The idea was actually attempted a couple of
times in the early ’60s, but both times tanked in the marketplace.

Another classic futuristic idea made real is “cultured meat,” i.e.,
animal protein grown in the laboratory, where, Wilson reports, it is
repeatedly stretched as a surrogate for physical exercise, in order to
give it the texture of a living, active organism. This grotesque
technology was memorably anticipated in Frederick Pohl and C.M.
Kornbluth’s 1952 novel “The Space Merchants,” a corporate dystopia of
the 21st century in which peon workers hack slices off a gigantic blob
of animate but nonsentient poultry breast called Chicken Little. But in
our nonfictional 21st century, the idea languishes in the laboratory
thanks to consumer resistance. Our cultural biases reject cultured meat
as gross, unnatural, an abomination. Indeed, popular taste is trending
the opposite way, toward the organic, the uncaged, the nonprocessed.

In “Where’s My Jetpack?” Wilson frequently adopts a reassuring tone
when examining a particular promised breakthrough that failed to
materialize. Everything from the robot butler to 3-D television to the
dinner-in-a-pill is presented as reasonably imminent (albeit likely to
be way out of most folks’ price range). Coming down the pipeline real
soon is the anti-sleeping pill: not a central nervous system stimulant
like amphetamine, and therefore avoiding all the associated problems to
do with abuse and paranoia, modafinil simply turns off the need for
sleep (although you can bet that in itself this will generate side
effects and mental disorders). Also on the horizon is the smart home, as
imagined in another Pohl and Kornbluth novel, “Gladiator-at-Law”
(1955). Disappointingly, though, rather than anticipating your moods
with décor changes and keeping the fridge stocked with all your favorite
delicacies, the intelligent domiciles of the near future will be
extensions of the assisted-living facility: apartments kitted out with
movement sensors that develop a feeling for their elderly inhabitants’
routines and send out alarm signals when, say, that regular hourly visit
to the toilet isn’t made.

According to Wilson, NASA
is working toward establishing a moon colony (though a rather minuscule
one) within the next 13 years. Better still, the classic science
fiction fantasy of the space elevator that carries us from the Earth’s
surface 300 miles up to the threshold of outer space is already
perfectly feasible, just prohibitively expensive. I would imagine the
billion-dollar price tag for the miraculously strong cable the elevator
glides up and down would pay for itself rather quickly, given that
journeying into space (and as result the commercial exploitation of
nonterrestrial mineral resources) would become approximately 100 times
cheaper than the existing alternative, the space shuttle.

Wilson’s talk of space elevators and other grandiose inventions like
solar mirrors or the fully enclosed city indicates how our expectations
of the “futuristic” have undergone an insidious scaling down in recent
decades. Mostly, “the future” seems to infiltrate our lives in a
low-key, subtle fashion. In their own way, the miniaturization of
communications technology (cellphones, BlackBerrys, etc.) and the
compression of information (iPods, MP3s, YouTube, downloadable movies,
etc.) are just as mind-blowing as the space stations and robots once
pictured as the everyday scenery of 21st century life. Macro simply
looks way more impressive than micro.

Sometimes it feels as if
progress itself has actually slowed down, with the 1960s as the climax
of a 20th century surge of innovation, and the decades that followed
consisting of a weird mix of consolidation, stagnation and rollback.
Certainly change in the first half of the 20th century seemed to
manifest itself in the most dramatic and hubristic manner. It was an era
of massive feats of centralized planning and public investment: huge
dams; five-year plans of accelerated industrialization; gigantic
state-administered projects of rural electrification, freeway
construction and poverty banishment. Science fiction writers who grew up
with this kind of thing (including the darker side of “public works” —
the mobilization of entire populations and economies for war, the Soviet
collectivization of peasant farms that resulted in massive famine,
genocide) naturally imagined that change would continue to unfold in
this dynamic and grandiose fashion. So they foresaw things like the
emergence of cities enclosed inside giant skyscrapers and grain
harvested by combines the size of small ships voyaging across vast
prairies.

It’s no coincidence, too, that sci-fi’s nonfiction
cousin, futurology — or future studies, as it is now more commonly known
— emerged as a discipline during this era of the activist nation-state.
World War II ratcheted up popular belief and trust in the exercise of
judiciously applied might by centralized government, and the post-1946
world offered plenty of opportunities for benevolent state power to be
flexed, from the challenges of postwar reconstruction to the development
of the newly independent third-world nations that emerged out of the
British Empire.

The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by
future-mindedness, an ethos of foresight that attempted not just to
identify probable outcomes but to steer reality toward preferred ones.
It’s no coincidence that those decades were the boom years for both
sci-fi and a spirit of neophilia in the culture generally — the
streamlined and shiny aesthetic of modernity that embraced plastics,
man-made fabrics and glistening chrome as the true materials of the New
Frontier. It’s the era that produced “The Jetsons,” probably the single
prime source of many of the tomorrowland clichés that haunt the
collective memory — personal rocket cars parked in the front drive, food
pills, videophones, robo-dogs — and that subsequently became a cue for
retrofuturist camp.

Today we seem to have trouble picturing the future, except in cataclysmic terms or as the present gone worse (“Children of Men”).
Our inability to generate positive and alluring images of tomorrow’s
world has been accompanied by the fading prominence of futurology as a
form of popular nonfiction. It carries on as an academic discipline, as
research and speculation conducted by think tanks and government-funded
bodies. But there are no modern equivalents of Buckminster Fuller or
Alvin Toffler. The latter, probably still the most famous futurologist
in the world, warned in his 1970 bestseller “Future Shock” that change
was moving too fast for ordinary citizens’ nervous systems and adaptive
mechanisms to cope with; 1980′s “The Third Wave” sounded a more positive
note about the democratic possibilities of technology. But Toffler was
just the most visible exponent of a bustling paperback subgenre of
“popular thought.” I recall getting one such fat paperback for my 16th
birthday, a book predicting all kinds of marvels, such as the resurgence
of lighter-than-air travel, which would fill the skies with giant
freight-carrying balloons and the aerial equivalent of ocean cruise
liners transporting people across the seas and continents in leisurely
fashion.

Some of the 1950s and 1960s anticipation and confidence
in the future had worn off by the ’70s: Ecological anxieties manifested
in everything from Neil Young’s “After the Goldrush” to the movie
“Silent Running,” while science fiction writers like John Brunner and
Harry Harrison imagined grim and gritty realistic early 21st century
scenarios of overpopulation, pollution and fuel crises in novels like
“Stand on Zanzibar” and “Make Room! Make Room!” (the latter adapted into
the far inferior movie “Soylent Green”). But the 1970s still contained a
strong current of popular futurism, reflected in the success of
magazines like Omni and in the popular music of the day, the pioneering
electronic sounds of Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Donna Summer
producer Giorgio Moroder. It was a conflicted decade, though, with
nostalgia gradually becoming a more dominant force (“Happy Days,”
“Grease,” ’20s chic). Even science fiction itself began to regress,
following the lead of “Star Wars” by abandoning the sophistication of
the 1960s “New Wave” of sci-fi (with its explorations of “inner space”)
and reverting to the swashbuckling space fantasies of the genre’s pulpy
early days.

In the ’80s, thinking about the future in
nonnegative terms seemed to become almost impossible.
Yesteryear seemed
more attractive: Postmodernism and retro recycling ruled popular
culture, while politically the presiding spirits of the era, Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were dedicated to restoration of an older
order, to rolling back the gains of the abhorred ’60s. Futurology’s
profile waned (can you name anything Toffler wrote after 1980?) and the
bestsellers in the “popular thought” tended to be jeremiads and “Where
did we go wrong?” investigations like Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves
to Death” (1985) and Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”
(1987).

The ’90s, however, saw a slight resurgence of futurism,
driven by the information technology boom, theorized by magazines like
Wired and Mondo 2000, soundtracked by another wave of electronic music
(the techno-tronica rave-olution). While some of the new breed of
futurologists were classic gee-whiz technology types like Kevin Kelly,
others were “zippies,” hippies sans any Luddite technophobia or
back-to-the-land nostalgia, people like Jaron Lanier and Ray Kurzweil.
All panaceas and marvels, the talk could get pretty wacky: nanotechnology,
virtual reality, trans-humanism. Kurzweil preached the notion that the
law of accelerating returns was propelling us at breakneck speed toward a
singularity: Fueled by cross-catalyzing innovations, the exponential
curve of progress will inevitably, sooner rather than later, hit
vertical, resulting in a rupture in human history, most likely entailing
sentient machines, the dis-incarnation of human intelligence,
immortality. Basically the rapture, with technological accouterments.
Some of Kurzweil’s predictions were more prosaic: By the middle of the
21st century he imagined computers becoming so intelligent they could be
genuinely musical, which for him translated as being able to jam with
human guitarists, Jerry Garcia/Carlos Santana-style.

After the
info-tech boom’s bust and 9/11, we haven’t heard as much from these
digi-prophets. All that Dow Jones-indexed mania has sagged to a sour
calm. Futurology as a popular nonfiction genre has been largely reduced
to short-term trend watching, cool hunting in the service of marketing
people and brand makers. Take the recently published “The Next Now:
Trends for the Future” by Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia. Even taking
into consideration the authors’ modest ambition to look a mere five
years ahead, this book’s bundle of predictions is frankly feeble. Almost
without exception, everything Salzman and Matathia “prophesy” is
already a highly visible and well-established trend: wikis, blogging,
celebrity chefs, gastro-porn, branding, the privatization of space,
overwork/sleep deprivation, the prolongation of adolescence into the
’30s and beyond, online dating, an aging population … The near future,
apparently, will just consist of more of the exact same.

Then
again, perhaps sociocultural and political prediction is simply a mug’s
game. In the 1970s, no one would or could have imagined that the
dominant form of pop music of the last two decades of the 20th century
would be rhythmatized boasts and threats delivered over beats; few would
have foreseen the emergence of reality TV as the most popular
entertainment format. On the political front, the annals of sci-fi are
littered with dystopian soothsayings that now look laughably off-base,
from Anthony Burgess’ “1985,” a 1978 novel about a trade-union-dominated
U.K. of the near future in which the country is brought to a standstill
on a weekly basis by general strikes, to Kingsley Amis’ 1980 novel
“Russian Hide-and-Seek,” a vision of Britain 50 years after its conquest
by the Soviets.

“Where’s My Jetpack?” shrewdly sticks to science and
technology. But this relentless focus on machines, gadgets and
life-enhancing innovations means that Wilson never touches on that whole
other aspect of the “unrequited future” — the dismay and disbelief felt
by many who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s only to witness a drastic
deceleration in the rate of social and cultural progress.
Perhaps the expectations of the 1960s, that era of rampant radicalisms,
were hopelessly unrealistic. Still, if you grew up, like me, reading
radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone (who argued in “The Dialectic
of Sex” that female liberation would come only with the invention of an
artificial womb that could unshackle women from the procreative
function) or New Wave of science fiction authors like Thomas M. Disch
(who in his novel “334″ imagined men being able to get mammary implants
and breast-feed their offspring), scanning contemporary popular culture
with its supermodel competitions, desperate housewives and scantily clad
pop divas is acutely disheartening. And these are about gender, just
one zone of stalled progress or outright regression. Race, gay rights,
drugs, socioeconomic equality, religion — on just about every front,
things either are not nearly as advanced as we’d have once expected or
have actually gone into reverse. Forget the goddamn jetpack: It’s the
sociocultural version of the “amazing future that never arrived” that
really warrants our anguish.